Children's Work and Apprenticeship

by

Introduction

Children appear to be predisposed to learn the skills of their elders, perhaps from a drive to become competent or from the
need to be accepted or to fit in, or a combination of these. And elders, in turn, value children and expect them to strive
to become useful—often at an early age. The earliest tasks are commonly referred to as chores. David Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (Lancy 2014, cited under Surveys and Anthologies), in surveying the relevant literature, advances the notion of a chore “curriculum.” The author notes that the tasks that
children undertake are often graduated in difficulty and complexity. These built-in levels, or steps, create a kind of curriculum
that children can progress through, matching their growing physical and cognitive competence to ever more demanding subtasks.
The anthropological literature on children’s work is both extensive and elusive. That is because, with the exception of Spittler’s
Hirtenarbeit: Die Welt der Kamelhirten und Ziegenhirtinnen von Timia (Spittler 1998, cited under Animal Husbandry), there is not a single volume devoted exclusively to the subject and relatively few articles or chapters with work as the
sole focus. In contrast, every ethnography of childhood and the family, as well as studies of subsistence systems, devotes
some attention to the contributions of children and their “education” to the survival skills inherent to the culture. The
same cannot be said for published material on the history of childhood, which, as yet, pays little attention to work. A distinction
must be made between the chores assigned to children in the household and village and “child labor.” See the Oxford Bibliographies article Child Labor for more information on that subject.

Surveys and Anthologies

Lancy 2014 is an overview of the anthropology of childhood and includes a chapter on the subject of work and apprenticeship. Lancy 2010 discusses the processes involved in children’s learning, including work skills. Lancy 2012 offers the first broad survey of children’s work. Liebel 2004 complements Lancy by providing a sociological perspective—primarily on children working for wages rather than in the village.
Zeller 1987 offers a brief survey of children’s work in thirteen societies. Spittler and Bourdillon 2012, an edited collection, highlights recent work on children and work in Africa.

Lancy, David F. “Learning ‘From Nobody’: The Limited Role of Teaching in Folk Models of Children’s Development.” Childhood in the Past 3.1 (2010): 79–106.

This work covers a wide reach but is much more focused on children as laborers than as helpers and workers at home. “Cross-cultural”
in the title should be “international.” The author is a sociologist and adopts the theoretical and analytical stance characteristic
of that discipline. Though he does cite some anthropological literature on children’s work, it is drawn almost exclusively
from the limited corpus of work published in German.

Spittler, Gerd, and Michael Bourdillon, eds. African Children at Work: Working and Learning in Growing Up for Life. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012.

The first volume to collect studies of children’s work, primarily in Africa. The main theme of the book is that children’s
work is also the pathway to knowledge and that work must be studied in cultural context. Exploitative forms of children’s
labor are discussed, but they are not the primary focus.

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